Our Project

Cruise activity and the recovery of urban and harbour building heritage: Strong elements of the common interest of sea towns to develop and strengthen the urban tourism sector.

CTUR enquires into how port-cities can be productive and no longer simple transit areas through cruise tourism activity.
This means that one of the issue is also to solve the tensions between port functions and urban functions, to answer to inhabitants’ aspiration in terms of employment, quality of life, housing and satisfying offers of equipment and public spaces.

The topic «Cruise traffic and urban regeneration», initially proposed by the city of Naples, registers in the continuity of work conducted from 2005-2007 in the framework of the working group SUDEST, centred on the study of specificities of the sustainable development of port cities.

During this programme, the partners identified a tendency of the port cities to propose city-port interface as a place where are articulated new metropolitan logics and where, in a way, is organized «the future of the port city»
In many projects of waterfront development, cruise activity is offered as a strong element of the port cities will to develop/reinforce the urban tourism industry.

Port cities must invest in a double competition: the one that the ports have to engage in order to catch maritime traffic, and the one that livens up the cities to reinforce their position on the European territory.
This is why cruise activity is the main subject of CTUR project.

TOPIC

Challenges

The main objective is to understand the role of cruise for the improvement of port cities.

The first step was the involvement in the CTUR network of cities and port authorities, the main actors, that can intervene in the process of the development of port cities. planning and managing the cruise development within a global project.

All CTUR partners, through the exchange of their own experience, will analyse three themes linked to the cruise tourism:

Transforming, regenerating, adapting the physical and environmental components of the “port-city system”:

the flow of persons that cruise generates is also conditioned by the quality of the city’s cultural offer. Partners will share their experience on how their city try to create cultural equipment of national or even international importance and how the urban-port heritage could intervene as a favourable component to the affirmation of the singularity of the places and the offer of a new experience for the visitors.

Cruise traffic and port heritage as economic and social generator:

how the warehouses and the embankments could give opportunities to revitalize and diversify the commercial facilities in the heart of the cities. By associating high and medium level shops in vogue with an environment empowered by a strong identity (build heritage and basins), these achievements can be offered today as a new kind of urban pole.

Furthermore the cruise, and urban tourism generate and require specific and qualified professional competences: this assumes the setting up of specific professional trainings open to local population so as to maximize the social effects in the city.

Governance:

Port areas need a strict cooperation>among the public institutions « urban and territorial », the port authorities, the local economic actors and civil society for the construction of the port city image and>the development of the territorial and urban infrastructures and facilities.

Key point of focus

Planning and spatial organization

  • Planning the waterfront revitalisation (including derelict industrial areas) in an overall approach of the port city development.
  • Bringing the cruise traffic to the core of the city, improving the connection between the cruise terminal and the city centre or developing the cruise infrastructures most closely with the city centre.
  • Improving the urban accessibility to the cruise terminal and, more generally, to the port in terms of efficient collective transports and in term of quality (landscape; security) of the pedestrian ways.
  • Improving the organization of the passenger port separating cruise traffic and ferry traffic.
  • Rationalizing the organization of the port functions setting up the hard functions in a suitable location and taking into account their environmental impacts.
  • Transforming a port-industrial derelict area into a new city quarter.
  • Mixing housing and cruise traffic in a same area and, more generally, creating a mix between maritime and urban activities within the framework of an integrated approach of sustainable development.
  • Conceiving new cruise terminals as open doors between the port and the city.
  • Improving the infrastructures and facilities of the passenger terminal to strengthen the position of the port city on the cruise market and to become a major

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